Some areas are still digging out

December 28, 2012

These kids, along with lots of others, were having a good time Thursday using the city's detention pond at E. Monroe St. and Piqua Road for some sledding. (Photo by J Swygart)

While some Indiana residents continued digging out Thursday from a winter storm that brought life to a standstill in southern parts of the state, Decatur and Adams County residents were mostly back to normal today ... normal, that is, in the aftermath of a 3.5-inch snowstorm.
Don't put the shovels and snow blowers away yet, however. The National Weather Service revised its forecast overnight and now says there is a 50 percent chance of snow showers in this area tonight.
Chances of snow are pegged at only 10 percent in Decatur today and 30 percent on Saturday.
Winds also are back to normal and the weather bureau says we should see highs around the 30-degree mark and nighttime lows in the low to mid 20s through New Year's Eve.
Blizzard conditions buried some areas of Indiana under a foot of snow — their heaviest accumulations in several years — on Wednesday.
Greene County Emergency Management director Roger Axe said the 12 inches of wet snow that fell on the southwestern Indiana county left local roads so mired the county’s sheriff got stuck for about an hour before his car was freed.
Axe said he expects road crews to finish up today clearing county roads of the region’s heaviest snowfall since a March 1996 storm dumped 22 inches of snow.
In Indianapolis, where the storm’s 7.5-inch snowfall was the deepest in nearly four years, officials hired 350 private snow-removal trucks to help clear residential roads.
Department of Public Works spokeswoman Lesley Malone said those contractors allowed the city to clear an additional 4,000 miles of residential streets in areas that lack neighborhood associations that handle snow-plowing duties. City crews cleared nearly another 7,000 miles of streets, she said.
The National Weather Service released a snowfall map Thursday showing that Wednesday’s storm buried four pockets of southwestern, south-central and southeastern Indiana with about a foot of snow. The storm dropped up to 3 inches of snow an hour in some areas.
The town of Ellettsville about 50 miles south of Indianapolis was blanketed by 13 inches of snow — the most of any Indiana community, the weather service said.
Jim Ragle, street commissioner in the town of 5,000 residents northwest of Bloomington, said his crews worked all day Wednesday and overnight to clear the Monroe Count town’s roads. ‘‘We’ve got a lot of snow piles around, but other than that we’re in pretty good shape,’’ he said. ‘‘We’re all ready for the next storm now, I guess.’’